


Primary Failure

by nennalem (melannen)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Politics, American Politics, Bad Sex, Elections, Fake Dating, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Publicity, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, alternate universe - United States, bad life choices, bouzingo parties, celebrities being exposed to their own rpf fandoms, enjolras's fangirls, primary election, research what research, vomit warning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-04-30 01:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5145212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/nennalem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras and Grantaire are both running in the Democratic U.S. Presidental primaries. They're  tied for last place. They keep bumping into each other at all the d-list political events that none of the viable candidates bother with. Things progress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i thought you ought to know

**Author's Note:**

> I am writing this over the course of enduring the 2016 US Presidential Elections. It will be updated sporadically over the next year because I am only writing bits of it whenever I start actually getting invested and need to be reminded that politics is ridiculous. Any resemblance to actual political systems or events is purely coincidental, given that I am trying as hard as I can right now not to pay attention to any of it.

The third time Grantaire ran for President, he had been a U.S. Senator for fourteen years, and was almost halfway through his third term. 

He had been an alcoholic for twelve of those years, although he hadn't admitted it even to himself until after he lost the nomination that first time. The second time he lost the nomination, he made the resolution that if the People of the United States decided they wanted him for their leader he'd give up drinking for good. He'd lost that nomination by one of the largest margins in recent history, and then woken up with a headache two weeks later and realized he couldn't remember the last time he'd been entirely sober.

After that he'd thrown up his hands and not even bothered to run in the next cycle. Now he figured that when he lost this last time, he could do a fearless and searching moral inventory of himself, quit politics, and then have the rest of his life to figure out the other eight of the twelve steps.

That was before he encountered Representative Enjolras.

Enjolras was also running for the nomination. They were both at some event at a college-- Grantaire had probably been told what it was, but he had probably been drunker than usual at the time, because fucked if he knew. Probably some kind of far-left social justice activism thing, the sort of place that was half Civil Rights elders and half students who still cared about that stuff. He'd noticed a lot of t-shirts with multi-cultural hands on them.

Not at all Grantaire's base, and none of the frontrunners would've dared show their faces, but at this point (which was still six months before the Iowa caucuses) his team were accepting all the invitations they got. It wasn't exactly enough to overload his schedule.

Enjolras sat in the green room with an ipad on his lap and a disgusted curl to his lip as he watched Grantaire come back in from his speech and immediately start drinking something that _could very well_ have been plain water. (It wasn't, of course.) 

"You do know your campaign is a joke, right?" he asked Grantaire.

Grantaire gave him what he hoped was a once-over that spoke of many things.

"I'm sorry," Enjolras added, looking like he might even be a little bit sorry. "It's just that I honestly can't tell if you _know_ , and it seems like it would be intolerably cruel not to tell you if you didn't know, and that if you did know, and it was some kind of performance art or something, you wouldn't mind hearing."

Grantaire gave him a much more thorough looking-over this time. It wasn't like it was a hardship: whatever else he was, the kid was easy on the eyes. He finished with an obvious and narrow-eyed analysis of the kid's perfect ass, and then said, "I think your pot may be looking a little bit black there, friend."

Enjolras flushed from the neckline up and said, "Fuck you."

Grantaire raised his eyebrows. "I hope you double-checked your mike wasn't on before you said that."

He hadn't, judging by the way he immediately felt for it in his collar. Grantaire always triple-checked these days. He was capable of learning eventually. "You listened to my stump speech, I take it," he said. "Did you appreciate how it managed to hit all the right emotional notes without containing any actual opinions or content? My advisors spent a long time getting that balance just right. I think it's a work of true political genius."

" _Some_ of us are trying to actually do good in the world," Enjolras muttered, still half into his collar, but he'd apparently been derailed from his righteous rage. 

Grantaire debated whether or not to tell him that with this style of mike, you couldn't actually turn it on and off on your own. He was pretty sure the techs had it handled. Instead he said, "Yeah, well, we all have to be young and stupid once."

"I'm as old as you are, _and_ I've been in politics longer," he answered, eyes blazing, but before Grantaire could voice his disbelief, Enjolras was called away to give his speech. All Grantaire could do was finish his drink and watch him go.

No way somebody with that ass was Grantaire's age. He'd give him thirty-five if he had to, but only because someone had apparently let him run for President.

He'd intended to sneak out and get a head start on drinking before the after-speech reception, but he would up listening to the kid's speech instead. It wasn't bad. The kid had charisma, and somebody on his campaign who could turn a phrase. 

Grantaire vaguely remembered that he had been similarly young and stupid once, although never anywhere near Enjolras' league when it came to the naive idealism. The first time he'd run for president he'd really thought he could be a driver for change. He'd been high on the victory of winning his Senate seat - the first time he'd ever decided that he wanted something, for himself, and he was good enough to do it. Oh, sure, he'd made it to Congress on his mother's connections, but they'd given him the Senate nomination because he was _good_ at it.

And everybody'd said he was too inexperienced, too lacking in connections, to have even a chance at winning, but if he wanted to go for it, maybe it'd get him some name recognition, maybe a platform.

It'd given him a drinking problem instead.

He told all this to his campaign director and chief strategist, much later that night, over one last brandy in his hotel suite, even though they'd heard it all before. Except the bits about Enjolras's ass.

"He is your age, actually," Bossuet, the campaign director, told him. "And been in politics longer. Oh, not national level," he added, "but he started as a local organizer and then worked his way up from a county council seat. And then I guess decided to skip from Congress directly to President. No chance of winning the nomination, of course, even if he wasn't a half-socialist radical."

"Would be kind of cool if he did have a chance. We could use the shakeup. Too bad there's no chance in hell," Joly, the strategist, said, and then yawned over his drink. "Sorry - long days, long nights. I think I'm starting to get brain damage from the cumulative sleep deprivation."

Bossuet tipped his glass. "That's politics for you."

"Do you two think my campaign's a joke?" Grantaire asked with accidental intensity, not realizing until that moment quite how much he cared about the answer.

"Of course not!" Joly exclaimed. "I think you're providing a very important moderate voice to provide a mainstream alternative choice to voters who are too familiar with the defects of the other candidates in the field."

Grantaire squinted. If he was slightly less drunk he might have been more sure whether that was a yes or no. That seemed like a good reason to have another drink.

"Look, R," Bossuet said, falling back on the old nickname from his House campaign, "Everybody knows this year is Valjean's race to lose. But if he does manage to lose it, I want you there to fill the void."

Yeah. Everybody did know that. He was the Anointed Savior of the party whose Time had Come at Last. Of course, four years ago Tholomyes had been the Anointed Savior - that was why Grantaire hadn't even bothered to run - and he'd managed to let The Bastard steal it out from under him and get back in office for another four years, and Congress with him. Grantaire'd spent the last three years with a vague sense of guilt that if he'd just tried for it, he could've kept that from happening.

And he had honestly believed that this year could be his year. Oh, a long shot, sure, but doable, with some old-fashioned American grit and money and strings to pull in the ol' boys network, why not, right? Stick it in the eye of everyone who thought he couldn't. It was worth a try, anyway. He was pretty sure he'd believed that. At some point. It would have been pretty silly to start the campaign if he hadn't believed that, right?

"A better choice than howling void," Grantaire said. "I'll drink to that." He ignored the little voice that was telling him there were six other moderates ahead of him in the polls, and at least half of them were more functional as people than he was, too.

"Enjolras's people tried to hire me for his campaign," Bossuet added.

"You never told me that!" Joly said.

"I turned 'em down," Bossuet answered. "Didn't think it needed to be said. But he's got good people on his team. And I like his work."

"Why'd you turn him down?" Grantaire asked, drunk enough to be honestly curious.

"You know my record," he said. Bossuet had an unbroken record of working for second-place finishers, and a firm belief that he was cursed. "I figured, second place would actually be pretty good for you, R, in this primary. A shot at the VP seat if nothing else. But Enjolras doesn't need something like that dragging him down. Besides," he added, "You're a friend. You've been there for me. And this country needs a good joke once in awhile."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Grantaire growled. Weirdly, though, it helped.

Bossuet saluted with his brandy glass. "That's what I'm here for."


	2. the problem with fourth walls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's possible that Grantaire needs some better media coaching. But then, who doesn't.

The next time he met Enjolras was backstage at a late-night comedy talk show. It was the evening after the first official debate, and the host had invited everyone who was running but didn't have high enough poll numbers to be invited to the debate. Which turned out to be a couple of people who didn't even have enough of an organization to get to the studio, one guy who apparently had too much pride to accept, and Enjolras and Grantaire.

He'd been expecting some kind of mock-debate, but he admittedly just agreed to everything Bossuet put in his events planner without looking at it that closely. Instead, he and Enjolras wound up sitting uncomfortably next to each other on the show's regular interview couch, with the host next to them on a bar stool, looking down at them with an anticipatory grin on her face.

"Why did you agree to this?" Enjolras muttered in his ear before the cameras started.

"I though it would be funny," he answered. "My campaign's a joke, right?" He threw his arm chummily around the back of the couch where it might accidentally fall onto Enjolras's shoulder.

Enjolras gave him an inscrutable look - and not as angry as he'd expected - but before he could reply, someone shouted, "Start in five!" and Enjolras shook himself, and suddenly went from "wet cat" to a fair imitation of relaxed and comfortable.

Grantaire actually was relaxed, but that was probably mostly the scotch he'd had on the ride over. Good scotch, though.

It wasn't as excruciating as he'd expected. The host, Matelote, had a good grounding in politics in between the jokes, and she stuck to the questions he'd gone over with his people in advance, which meant it was pretty simple to give his stock answers and laugh when she laughed. And there was a small unexpected pun battle, but pun battles happened sometimes. Bossuet would understand. Joly would say it was "humanizing."

And then there were the questions she asked Enjolras, which were. Well. A lot more _interesting_ than the ones his staff had pre-approved. Some of them on a political level - she was asking him really specific stuff about his policy positions, and he was a lot more practical and down-to-earth about it than you'd expect just based on, say, reading his website. The passion still came through, though, even if the "jokes" he ended each question on were clearly heavily rehearsed.

And then there were the non-political questions.

"Did you know," Matelote asked Enjolras, "that you have fangirls?"

"Fangirls?" he replied, with the surprise of someone who knows very well but hopes pretending ignorance will get him out of explaining, a tactic that Grantaire knew very well.

"They've formed fan groups online," she told him with glee. "They have hashtags! They call themselves the Enjolrati."

"Well, I am, of course, delighted that there is a growing movement in support of my campaign and the issues that are so important to young people today."

"It's not your _iss_ ues they're interested in so much as your _ass_ ets," she leered. "Gibelotte! Cue the slide show!"

"Oh god," Enjolras said. He started to go red and then folded his face down into his hands. "Oh god, oh god."

Grantaire patted him on the back and said, "There, there, it could be worse," before he'd even realized what he was doing. Enjolras sat back up in response, but didn't bite Grantaire's head off like he'd half-expected. Instead he watched the slideshow that was playing on the overhead screens with an air of grim determination.

Some of the art was actually pretty good, Grantaire thought with the expertise of someone who'd had almost four semesters of art school decades ago. And she'd at least had the mercy to stick to drawings rather than photomanips.

"Who are the two handsome young men who are with you in the Oval Office?" Matelote asked with false curiosity.

"They're my top advisors, Courfeyrac and Combeferre," Enjolras managed to say with an air of professional detachment. "They've been with me since we started in Detroit. Although not. With me. Like that. Not that I believe that any relationships between consenting adults are inherently wrong, but part of respecting consent is, um, keeping private matters private. And that includes, er, imaginative sexual fantasies about public figures which are meant to be shared between friends within a community rather than on mass media. What are they _doing_ in that one?" he asked, and then went even redder.

"You actually have a policy position prepared on the ethics of porn about your campaign?" Grantaire said, in order to head off somebody trying to explain to him what they were doing in the picture. He wasn't sure either of them would survive that. 

"It's come up before," he answered with a growl.

"Must be nice to have things like that still come up at your advanced age," Grantaire said, with an eyebrow waggle, because screw it, they were probably going to have to cut most of this anyway. He wondered how the internet would react if somebody leaked that Grantaire _had_ slept with both of his top advisors. At once. Then again, even with Bossuet along, he and Joly hardly measured up to the attractiveness quotient of Enjolras and his top people - the two advisors in the pictures weren't quite in Enjolras's league, but then, very few human beings were.

"Speaking of things that are failing to come up," Matelote interrupted. "Your poll numbers haven't been too good, Grantaire, even compared to the last time you ran. There are people starting to wonder why you're even still campaigning."

"I'm hoping for fangirls like his," he said.

Enjolras tipped his back to look up at the roof and suddenly seemed authentically delighted. "You're going to regret saying that."

"I _have_ had worse," he said. 

"Mm, yes," Matelote said. "You're not exactly a stranger to airing your personal life out in public. Tell us, what is your ex-wife doing these days?"

Grantaire didn't actually mind talking about Flora. The breakup had been as amicable as something that messily public could have been - and even the messy private bits had mostly consisted of her screaming at him about how he could at least have the decency to care that she was leaving, while he drank and told her that she was right, she deserved better.

Honestly, if it were possible for _him_ to leave himself and run off to a life of luxury with a Canadian oil magnate, he would have jumped at the chance.

"She's doing well, as far as I know," Grantaire said. "Her husband tried to donate to my PAC, as a 'no hard feelings' offering, I assume. I had to turn it down, of course."

"Hard feelings after all?" she asked with false sympathy.

Grantaire waved it off. "No, no, nothing to do with that, just my deep commitment to environmental justice, of course. Can't be taking money from the oil industry, or whatever it is he does, I didn't really pay attention."

Enjolras gave him a look he couldn't read at all. 

"Oh, of course!" Matelote agreed with a wink."And speaking of environmental justice, Enjolras, you have some positions on climate change that have been described as 'pie-in-the-sky bizarrity--'"

And with that they were safely back on political grounds and Grantaire got to stick to the same boring non-answers he'd been using for years, which was good, because in retrospect he'd probably hit the pre-show cocktails a little more heavily than even he should have.

"Grantaire," Joly asked him on the bus a few days later, with a strange tone in his voice, "Didn't you say that you wished you had an internet porn following like the Enjorati?"

"They promised they'd cut that, I swear!"

"Oh, they did," he said, staring at his tablet like he was wondering if it would make more sense turned upside down. "That's not the problem."

"Nobody was going to watch that show anyway," Grantaire said, "Not up against the real debate. At least, not anybody who cares about politics."

"Well, except the Enjolrati," Bossuet added. "They probably taped it for late-night wank material."

"And _that_ would be the problem," Joly said.

"What?"

"The Enjolrati have discovered you," Joly said grimly. "And decided that you are, and I quote, 'Weirdly hot in a Teddy Roosevelt kind of way, and I could listen to that voice all night'. Not that I fundamentally disagree, but that's a _really_ inaccurate drawing of your fundament."

"What? Okay, give," Grantaire said, and grabbed for the tablet, but by the time he did, Joly had locked the screen, so Bossuet took it and unlocked it, because they were exactly the kind of couple who knew each other's passwords.

"Wow," Bossuet said, holding the screen angled away from Grantaire. "You're right, that is entirely the wrong shape."

"Give, I want to see how they drew you," Grantaire whined. Bossuet ought not to have been attractive at all - and it never came over in still shots - but somehow he was.

"Why would you think I'm in it?"

"What she showed us was all Enjolras and his top aides--"

"Yeah, that's not exactly it," Bossuet said, and showed him the screen.

It was a considerably-more-attractive version of himself, and an actually-very-accurate version of Enjolras, rather... nakedly entwined on the couch from the chat show.

"Is his hair _glowing_?" Grantaire asked.

"That's what you're focusing on??"

"The kid's about fifteen years old, there isn't anything else I can focus on!"

"I told you, he's your age," Joly said.

"I understand that," Grantaire said slowly, "But I need to believe he's about fifteen years old." He glanced over at the tablet screen again, although he was pretty sure the image was already seared into his memory forever. He'd been aware that Enjolras was almost unbelievably attractive - it was impossible not to notice - but he'd apparently managed to fool himself into believing he was keeping his own attraction under control. That was apparently not going to work anymore. Maybe if he could convince himself the man - the _kid_ , christ, in the drawing he looked about twelve, but then in the drawing so did Grantaire - was doubly off limits, he could handle it.

Joly took the pad back and locked it again. "Do I have to institute another ban on checking your own google alerts?"

They'd done that a few times when the press was particularly bad and Grantaire was in a particularly bad spot. This was not that. "I can handle my own affairs, Joly."

Joly and Bossuet looked at each other. "That's a yes, then," Joly said.

Sometimes it was a problem, working with people who'd known him too well for twenty years.

"So that decided," Joly said, "How do you want to play this in the press?"

"In the press? It's something a lonely pervert posted on _tumblr_."

"Look, we're already getting mostly silly season coverage," Joly said, "And that's not the only piece of this out there. Somebody is absolutely going to pick this up, if only so they can play with tired old 'bedfellows' puns and talk about how hot Enjolras is."

The press had yet to get tired of talking about how hot Enjolras was. Grantaire didn't exactly blame them. 

"Play it up, obviously," Grantaire said. "Any publicity is good publicity."

"You don't think that would piss off Enjolras's people?"

It would probably piss off Enjolras's people. "Okay, fine, then, I'll talk to Enjolras about it--"

"How about not?" Bossuet raised his eyebrows. "Tell you what, we'll call his people, and then we'll give you talking points."

The talking points were that he would do his patronizing amusement routine if it came up - "you know the one," Bossuet said, and yes he did, but Bossuet didn't need to bethat smug about it - and Enjolras would continue with "uncomfortable but supportive of people's choices". And they would try to avoid 'snuggling on couches' if possible, because they didn't need the distraction.

Grantaire would have argued this, but Enjolras was still trying to keep his campaign about the issues for some reason, so the verdict was hands off and don't play it up. "Just, try to be good, Grantaire," Joly told him. "If only for the sake of my nerves."

He coudn't afford to lose Joly, so he supposed he'd try.


	3. everything is better in a hot air balloon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enjolras and Grantaire get trapped together in a hot air balloon. With a Republican.

The next time he talked to Enjolras, they were in a hot air balloon. It was at a state fair somewhere flat and hot, and they were ceremonially opening the new tethered hot-air-balloon ride, which meant going straight up for two hundred feet, standing around in a wicker basket for five minutes, and coming back down.

He'd had to do the patronizing amusement routine at the press session before the opening, and thus had been reminded to stay as far away as possible from Enjolras, just for the fangirls' peace of mind. But the only Republican candidate who'd also been desperate enough to accept the nomination was also in the basket with them. And it was round, so staying as far away from his conservative cooties as possible meant being as close to Enjolras as possible.

They stood awkwardly at arm's reach, looking out over the fairground. Going up had been about as exciting as riding an elevator. He supposed it was a nice view, although the fairground was, cruelly, dry. And he'd just had to fly back from DC for a vote, and as a result he hadn't had anything to drink, except a few cocktails on the plane, for more than twenty-four hours.

"I should have let Combeferre swap places with me after all," Enjolras muttered.

Grantaire tried, with all of his limited willpower, to continue stonily staring down at the field, but he was unable to resist Enjolras's apparent desire to converse.

"Oh?" he said, with the vague memory that Combeferre was one of the advisors who appeared most frequently in the porn. Possibly the one with glasses. Not that he'd been sneaking illicit google searches behind Joly's back.

"He gets very excited about anything related to aerospace," Enjolras said. 

"Even hot-air balloons?"

"Especially hot-air balloons. Never mention the Montgolfiers. I, by contrast, am not fond of looking down on things from great heights."

Just then, all three of their cell phones rang. Enjolras's ringtone was something disco that he didn't recognize; the Republican's was apparently "Dixie".

His was "Doctor, Doctor" which meant Joly, who had worked almost two years as a GP before realizing he hated it and going into politics instead. 

"So," Joly said when he answered, "The machinery down here is slightly broken and things might not be going entirely to plan."

Joly was capable of working himself into a lather over the most ridiculous imaginary scenarios, but put him in the middle of a real crisis, and he was solid as a rock.

"Are we going to fall out of the sky?" Grantaire said, fairly certain that Joly would have lead with something else if that were true.

"Not, but we, uh, may have some difficulty in getting you _down_ out of the sky. Something jammed. Look, they're working on it, they're quite confident it will be fixed shortly, but it might be more like ten or fifteen minutes. Play cards or something?"

"Bossuet owes me _at least_ a bottle of whiskey for talking me into this."

A couple feet away, Enjolras was saying, "I _definitely_ should have let Combeferre take my place," as he hung up, and the Republican muttered something about a lawsuit.

"It sounds like we all got the same news!" Grantaire said, as obnoxiously cheerful as possible. "Anyone for a couple hands of poker?"

The Republican glared at him and then started hissing into his phone again. Enjolras rubbed his hands over his face and said, tiredly, "No thanks I don't gamble." Of course he didn't. He was possibly the most squeaky-clean, scandal-free politician since Mr. Smith went to Washington. 

Grantaire thought to himself that if Enjolras really was bad at heights, he should probably try to say something comforting or something, but honestly he hated that sort of talk, and anyway, Enjolras seemed to be handling it on his own: he'd sat down on the floor of the gondola with his back to the wall, so he couldn't see out, and was reading something on his phone.

Grantaire should probably be doing something equally productive. He considered calling Joly again, to see if any progress had been made, but Joly was probably better off without the annoyance. Instead he followed Enjolras's lead and leaned against the wall, staring across the basket into the deep blue sky and pretending there wasn't also a Republican ex-governor in his field of view.

"You really do care deeply about the environment," Enjolras said out of the blue.

"What?" Grantaire replied, unproductively.

"You said that," Enjolras said, "On the talk show. It was the only concrete policy position mentioned in an hour-long interview, and you said it like a joke, but I went and looked up your voting record. You have the best voting record on environmental issues in the Senate, and you've co-sponsored dozens of bills. Most of which actually made it to the floor, which is off-the-curve astounding, given the current state of the Senate. You just flew all the way back to DC for the vote on the natural gas bill, didn't you? And not just for the vote, but early enough to do some last-minute campaigning for it. But you never talk about that in public unless you can pass it off as a joke. _Why keep that a secret_? You should be telling the world!"

Hell. Grantaire should have known that somebody would catch that slip, and of course it was the worst possible person. He considered trying to pass it off as a joke again, but he couldn't figure out how. And there was no alcohol and no way to escape. And it was Enjolras asking, Rep. Enjolras (D. Mich), who was honest, cheerful, thrifty, clean, brave and reverent.

"Do you know how many nights I've spent," he said, "On the campaign trail, or before that on business trips, alone in a hotel room, with nothing but a minibar, my shaving kit, cable news, and the inside of my head for company? And then one time I opened a drawer and found the Gideon bible, and opened it to Ecclesiastes. Koheleth," he added, because Joly would smack him if he ever forgot that the Hebrew was first.

"I'm not much of a Bible person," Enjolras said, at the same time the Republican said, "I didn't know you were a Bible-reading man."

Grantaire ignored him and replied to Enjolras, "I think the entire country is aware of that." The conservative media'd had a field day with some of his interview replies about "agnostic deism" a few months ago. Kid really needed to learn the basics of how to shape a message. "You should try Ecclesiastes, though. It's a poem written 2500 years ago by this sad, old, drunken cynic complaining about how the world is fucked, humans are always fucking each other over, and it doesn't matter anyway because once we're dead nobody will care, so you might as well drink. I find it comforting because it proves humanity has been pulling the same crap in basically the same ways for all of written history, and nothing anybody does has stopped it. That's become the core of my political philosophy."

" _That's_ your political philosophy?" Enjolras muttered.

"It's survived two and a half millennia of human cultures rising and falling, and it's just as true as it was then," Grantaire said. "How long have your political philosophies been around?"

Enjolras shook his head. "That's not a philosophy a man can live by," he said.

"To the contrary," Grantaire said. "It's the only philosophy I can find that I can live by. If humanity have been fucking up the exact same ways for those thousands of years, and still keep going anyway, than I can keep fucking up for as long as I've got, if I have to. That's what the Preacher says: _Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever._ " He stopped. "And there's your answer to the question you didn't ask: I do what I can with environmental law because I don't care if people keep fucking each other up forever, but I'd rather it _was_ forever, and therefore I'd prefer the earth continueth abiding."

"Okay," Enjolras said. "I can see that. I don't agree, but I can accept the reasoning. But if you do want to make change happen there, why keep it so quiet? You have influence! Power! You should be standing out front, speaking truth, being a crusader! You could make a real difference."

"You made it this far in politics and you still think that way? Even in private? Wow," Grantaire said.

Before he could say anything else he'd regret, their phones all went off simultaneously again: Rescue, Joly told him, the mechanism had been repaired, and it cranked them back down to ground level, if much more slowly and noisily than it had sent them up.

"No more hot air balloons," Grantaire said, with exaggerated relief, to the gathered local press at the obligatory, if shortened, after-stunt meetup.

 

"We need to introduce Enjolras to Bahorel," he told Joly and Bossuet later that night in the hotel room.

They looked at each other. "Because it would be hilarious?" Joly said.

"Yes," Grantaire said. "No! Actually. Yes, it would be hilarious. But mostly I think he could learn a lot from Bahorel's team. He hasn't got a clue how to run a disruptive campaign."

"You do remember that he's meant to be your opponent, right?" Bossuet said. "As your campaign strategist, I feel like I'm obligated to remind you of this."

Grantaire and Joly looked at him. "Can you honestly say that you think he and Grantaire have ever been competing for the same voters? And honestly I think Grantaire's right - they can't seem to decide if they're a radical fringe campaign or if they're aiming to bring the left into the mainstream. Or possibly they don't realize there's a difference. Bahorel would gleefully rattle them into shape if we gave him an excuse."

"Joly's treason aside--" Bossuet said, stretching his long legs out to cross them over the coffee table, and waving his brandy glass.

"It's not treason!" Joly protested, flushing hard enough that Grantaire could see it through his skin, which was one of his most endearing qualities. "I think they've got some good policies, that's all."

"You think their junior speechwriter has fine eyes," Bossuet said. "Anyway, I don't disagree about the policies, for all that they're utterly impracticable and pointless long shots that would never work in the real world, even if they passed Congress, and I'm not fond of relying on miracles and grace."

"Says the man who spent all of grad school living on free pizza and couchsurfing with exes."

"That was before I met you," Bossuet said, and kicked him under the table. "Now I've learned how much better it is to have something truly stable to rely on. Not that you aren't a miracle--"

"So we're agreed," Grantiare interrupted, before they could get too distracted by reaffirming their relationship, presumably against the challenge of the speechwriter with the nice eyes. "Interesting policies, utterly impractical, bad grasp of strategy, we should hook them up with Bahorel. Unless," he added, when neither agreed offhand, "You'd rather talk some more about the speechwriter with the nice eyes."

"You should have seen her," Bossuet told him immediately. "While you all were stuck up in the balloon, and the techs were trying to get you down, and then one of Enjolras' staff said he had an engineering degree and tried to help, so of course Joly had to say he was a scientist too and help - disregarding the fact that his degree is in medicine - and this speechwriter comes up to me and rolls her, admittedly, very fine eyes, and says, 'I don't suppose you can do anything to make them stop bothering the techs, can you?' and I'm about to protest that if she can't stop her own team I don't know why I could stop Joly, but before I can he comes running over babbling something about _sabotage_ , and then he gets distracted staring at the speechwriter. For the record," he added, "Just for the record, I saw her first."

"Oh right!" said Joly. "I'm pretty sure the balloon was sabotaged." Then he finished his drink. "It was like somebody had poured sand into the gearing or something, that can't have been a coincidence, you must be really scaring the establishment if they're trying for assassinations. I forgot I was going to say something about that."

"It could have been bad luck," Bossuet pointed out. "Never rule out bad luck."

"So I'm sitting hundreds of feet above the ground,trapped in a rickety aeronautical device, and you two are both too distracted by romancing the enemy to remember to warn me it was _murder attempt_?" Nobody mentioned the obvious truth that if it was a murder attempt - and he was pretty sure it wasn't, Joly was just enjoying one of his catastrophic fantasies again - that Grantaire sure as hell wouldn't have been the one in the balloon who was scaring people enough to be a target.

"Don't you start talking about 'romancing the enemy,'" Joly said, pointing the half-empty bourbon bottle at him before refilling his glass. "You will not enjoy where that conversation goes. I saw how you helped him down out of the gondola. Just thank your stars nobody got pictures. The fangirls will be happy enough as it is."

Grantaire threw his hands in the air. "So! Enjolras! Bahorel! Introductions!"

"Why not," Joly said, and then offered Bossuet a refill as well.

"Don't mind if we do."


	4. what happens at Bahorel's parties

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire's people talk Enjolras's people into something that is definitely, absolutely, no question, a good idea.

Introducing Bahorel and Enjolras was a bit more complicated than it might have appeared, but not that complicated. Luckily, they continued their habit of both showing up at political events that nobody else cared about, in little towns so podunk that both teams were in the same hotel by necessity. So it was just a matter of Bossuet poking his head in Courfeyrac's hotel room door and inviting Enjolras's people over for drinks.

...to be honest it worried Grantaire a little bit that his people had apparently gotten that chummy with Enjolras's people without his noticing. Especially while he was still forbidden from getting chummy with Enjolras on pain of internet pornography. On the other hand, Courfeyrac brought several bottles of very good wine, so it didn't worry him _that_ much.

"Bahorel?" Courfeyrac said, rolling his half-full glass around in his hands. "Is he running _again_? I guess I shouldn't be surprised you know him, he's the man you'll have to beat out for most times losing a presidential election."

"Should I know who Bahorel is?" Enjolras asked. He was on the suite's loveseat next to Grantaire, drinking a scotch-and-soda without the scotch. Grantaire wasn't sure how they'd ended up sharing a piece of furniture again, but it might have something to do with the fact that Joly and Bossuet were sharing the sofa with a young lady from Enjolras's crew who did indeed have lovely smoky dark eyes with perfectly winged eyeliner.

"You don't know who _Bahorel_ is?" Joly asked. "Seriously?"

"The name rings a bell." He shrugged. "I don't think he's someone who's ever been relevant to me before, though."

"He's run for President... how many times? More than Grantaire, here, anyway," Courfeyrac said. "And he's never won an election. Ever. Not for anything."

"Five times," said Combeferre. "He starts a new, one-issue party every cycle. Last time it was, what? Abolition of inheritance?"

"Yep," Courfeyrac said, looking down at his phone. "He ran under the Share the Wealth ticket. Got even fewer votes than the Snake People guy."

"Sneeple," Bossuet muttered under his breath, and Joly muffled a snort of laughter. So, interestingly, did the speechwriter.

"And people call _me_ unelectable?" Enjolras said. " _Why_ do you want me to meet him, is this sabotage so you can paint me as radical?"

"Nobody needs a sabotage plot to paint you as radical, Representative Enjolras," Grantaire said. "You do that yourself, it would be too easy to even be entertaining. Look, Bahorel doesn't _want_ to get elected; he does it to be a gadfly. But nobody knows more than he does about leveraging media attention to get results with an off-the-mainstream political campaign."

"This year he's apparently running as the Liberation Party," Courfeyrac continued reading off his phone. "He's campaigning for secession referendums for the Republic of Texas, Cascadia, Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, New Hampshire, the Republic of Lakotah, all the Territories, and, um, something called the Maritime Republic of Eastport. And statehood referendums for Puerto Rico, D.C., and Guam."

"He's campaigning for an independent Texas? Not that we wouldn't all possibly be better off without, but there's no way that would ever be workable. Much less the others. Well, maybe some of the territories, if the political will appeared. And the statehood referendums, of course, that's reasonable, frankly it's a national embarrassment that they haven't happened yet."

"That's one of the things he does, though, y'see," Joly answered Enjolras. "He sets out these ridiculously radical positions and everyone's laughing at them, and then you find yourself saying 'ok, maybe meeting him halfway wouldn't be that bad' and next thing you know he's shifted the entire public discourse. Really basic psychology, okay, and he couldn't use it if he was trying to win, but it's Bahorel, so," Joly shrugged. "It works. The first time he ran his platform was legalizing the drug trade."

"Legalizing the drug trade?" Enjolras said. "That's not what I'd call success. I mean, sure, decriminalizng marijuana is reasonable, and removing mandatory sentencing didn't come a day too late, but surely he doesn't think we should have people selling heroin and meth in corner stores."

"Ah, but twenty years ago when he ran on it, even medical marijuana seemed out of reach. And now it's national, and half the states allow recreational too. That's what he does. That's his magic."

"His magic of not winning?" Enjolras crossed his arms over his chest and looked over at Grantaire. "Is that what this is? One more barb about how my campaign is pointless?"

Grantaire rolled his eyes. "Looked, I suggested this because I thought your aims and his lined up well. I like him because he throws a great party and he's always reliable for publicly embarrassing someone who's not me, but most mainstream politicians I know are afraid of going within a hundred feet of him in case some kind of cooties rub off. You people don't seem to be afraid of looking like wild-eyed radicals, and if you had a little more direction and experience and PR polish and connections you could maybe even go somewhere, and I think he'd find it amusing to adopt you, and his team has some of the best far-left political thinkers in the country on it, people who don't care who's in power as long as the country's going in the right leftist direction - but it's no skin off my back if you'd rather not."

Courfeyrac was looking down at his phone again. "Prouvaire is his campaign manager? And this says Feuilly's his chief policy advisor."

Enjolras perked up at that name like a bird dog on a scent. "Professor Feuilly? The economist? Of Berkeley?"

"Yep," Courfeyrac said.

"He's turned down every single candidate who's ever asked him for even an endorsement!"

"You asked?" Grantaire said.

"Of course I asked!" Enjolras said. "He's the most brilliant economist currently working in the United States, have you read his--" he stopped. "You don't actually care."

"No, no, carry on," Grantaire said. "I'm enjoying your enthusiasm." It was vastly heartening to see Enjolras be as embarrassingly enthusiastic about someone as he was well aware he'd been about Enjolras to Bossuet and Joly couple of times. A few.

Even if his drnuken encomiums to Enjolras had less to do with arcane elements of fiscal and tax policy and more to do with... other things.

"Well. I," Enjolras said. "What are you proposing? That we set up a meeting?"

"We could do that," Grantaire said. "He usually tries to stay away from establishment politicians--"

Combeferre looked like he was about to interrupt, so Grantaire clarified, "I know you're vaguely nauseated at the idea that said descriptor applies to you, but Bahorel uses it for everyone who has so much as walked by a State Capitol Building without throwing raw eggs at it. Anyway, he trusts me, because you can't get _that_ drunk with somebody that many times without trusting them a little, so he'd probably agree to give you some pointers if I vouched for your quixotic bona fides and total lack of any real risk of winning--"

"You're just selling me on this better and better every minute," Enjolras muttered.

"--But that might give the impression of collusion or something, if the media picked up on it," he said. "And you do have at least a tiny shot in the dark of winning, so you might not want his cooties to get on you if you can help it. No, what I was thinking was that he's throwing a little get-together in South Dakota in a couple weeks, and as usual he sent us invitations." Grantaire almost always went to Bahorel's parties because, well, they were _Bahorel's parties_ , but he did usually stay away when he was technically running against Bahorel in an election. This was special circumstances, though. "It's just over the border from Iowa, so I suspect you're planning to be in the area anyway. I thought you could quietly go as my plus-one." He fished the invite out of his breast pocket and dropped it on Enjolras's lap.

Enjolras started to reach for it, and then caught himself. "And how is _that_ less likely to lead to a media scandal than setting up a decorus meeting?"

"Because what happens at Bahorel's parties stays at Bahorel's parties," Courfeyrac said, before Grantaire had a chance. "He knows everyone who's everyone, and he has enough dirt on most of them that they don't dare break that rule. Bahorel's parties are, jesus, _legendary_ networking opportunities, people talk about them in _whispers_. No wonder you-- You really have an invite?"

"Three, actually, if you can talk Joly or Bossuet into taking you as their date."

Joly looked Courfeyrac up and down. "I wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers," he said.

Courfeyrac honest-to-God blushed, dark enough to see it through his skin. "Enjolras," he said, "we cannot turn this chance down. I don't care about your scruples. We have to."

Grantaire had been going to Bahorel's parties since he was a teenager tagging along with his mom's interns and Bahorel was barely out of college and mostly interested in pot. He'd forgotten that for people who'd come up in liberal politics from other routes, they were exclusive and sought-after opportunities. Especially since they really didn't seem very exclusive once you met some of the people who went.

"Will Feuilly be there?" Combeferre asked.

"Probably," Grantaire said. "He usually makes his staff come."

Enjolras scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed. "All right. Fine. Okay. So how are we doing this?"


	5. the man who never died

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire reconnects with some old friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a break for Yuletide but now I am back! Ish. Too much watching primary election returns...

Bahorel's party was, as usual, a masterpiece of joyful chaos. Grantaire had no idea how you even convinced three thousand people to come to Mitchell, South Dakota for what was essentially an evening of late-middle-aged rich people pretending to be cooler than they were, but Bahorel could pull it off. 

Joly and Bossuet had already dragged the speechwriter with the fine eyes, who had used their last plus-one invite, off toward the dancing. Grantaire spared a few thoughts to hope she'd be okay, but if she couldn't keep up with the two of them, really it was better they found out now.

Enjolras was sticking close to Grantaire, and Combeferre was sticking close to Enjolras. He was expecting them to start holding each other's hands for safety like small children in the scary woods in a horror movie. (It had apparently been decided among Enjolras's team that Courfeyrac wanted to come far too badly to be safely allowed to, which frankly made Grantaire want to get really drunk with him sometime. So Combeferre had come instead.)

" _This_ is what Courferyac said was a legendary meeting of wheelers and dealers?" Combeferre muttered.

"I can promise you that there are definitely dealers here," Grantaire said. "Ah, and there's someone you need to meet." 

It could hardly be anyone other than Prouvaire, even before he saw Grantaire's gesture and made his way through the crowd to them. He was wearing what would have been a perfect replica of a late Roman ionic chiton, except that it was really obviously made out of a vintage smurf-print bedsheet, his braids were crowned with a diadem made of blue and red Indian corn, and there was a wicked-looking pruning knife stuck casually through one of the belts. Leave it to Prouvaire to look more like he was at a frat party than when they'd actually _been_ at frat parties- when they were in school together he'd've been dressed in black and sitting in a dark corner trying to get someone to listen to his poetry.

"Grantaire!" he called, when he was close enough to be heard over the terrible music. "Didn't expect to see you here, with the election on."

"Hoc Pomona fuit, qua nulla Latinas inter hamadryadas coluit sollertius hortos nec fuit arborei studiosior," Grantaire declaimed in reply.

Prouvaire pulled him into a bear hug and then said, "Finally, a man of culture, a man who understands."

"It suits you," Grantaire said as he was released. "Blue is your color."

"I thought, since we're in the Corn Palace, _somebody_ ought to do honor to Pomona," he said. "Just in case."

"I didn't know you were into the Hellenic stuff," Grantaire said. "It's not very hip-hop."

"Oh, I'm not. But Pomona was adopted into the American civic mythology and all that," he said. "The number of county courthouses in this country with shrines to Pomona, Grantaire! And, of course, the Pomona Granges, survivors of the great 19th century populist rural cooperative movement. I am all in favor of the goddess of rural co-ops."

"As signified by the Smurfs?" Combeferre put in dryly.

"Another man of culture!" Prouvaire said. "Grantaire, introduce us."

"Prouvaire, this is my date, Representative Enjolras of the great state of Michigan, and his friend, the Hon. Mr. Combeferre," Grantaire said, "I'm not sure why he's along. Possibly to provide more culture. Enjolras, this is Bahorel's campaign manager, Prouvaire."

Enjolras attempted to shake his hand with an endearingly stiff courtesy. "I'm sorry," he said. "Nobody told us this was a costume party."

"Oh, it's not," Prouvaire said, accepting the handshake with such vim that his diadem started to slip. "Not particularly, anyway, but any chance to dress up is a good one, hey?"

"All of Bahorel's parties are costume-optional," Grantaire said. "I thought I wouldn't worry you with that the first time out."

"Wait, did you say Enjolras?" Prouvaire asked, and looked at him a little bit closer. "You brought us a virgin!"

Enjolras blushed. "I’m sorry?" he said.

"First-timer for a national campaign," Prouvaire clarified. "You’ll probably want to go up to the command center, then. Say hello to the staff."

"They want to meet Feuilly," Grantaire stage-whispered.

"He is, as usual, working." Prouvaire rolled his eyes. "They’re set up in the quiet area in the display room on the balcony level. It won’t be hard to find."

The display room was home to an exhibit of photographs of cornfields and oil derricks, and a scattering of tables and chairs. There was a game of dominoes going at one of them, and someone Grantaire recognized as a senior State Senator from Texas was in an armchair with a very young man on her lap feeding her champagne and canapes. 

At the other end of the room a long table held half-a-dozen laptops and tablets scattered among empty bottles and what must have been some of Bahorel’s campaign staff, because they were in costume: costumes were optional for guests at Bahorel’s parties, but mandatory for Party members. 

There was a young woman in a leopard-print dress and cat ears frantically doing data entry, and a young man with green spikes in his hair who was either dressed as a punk Statue of Liberty or was just wearing his usual; Grantaire wasn't up on the fashions of kids these days. An older man was wearing work pants and a canvas jacket and cap, and that probably was a costume: Grantaire hadn’t spent much time with the Feuilly in years, but he’d seen enough of him to know that he tended to go more for impeccable designer suits. Also, he was peppered with gunshot wounds, which would be fairly bad taste if it wasn't a costume. He was telling the kid with the Liberty spikes, "No, you have to stay up here and work because you’re too young for one of Bahorel’s parties."

"I’m twenty-four!" he said. "I have an MBA from Dartmouth!"

"At _least_ another twenty years, then," he said, without looking up.

"Professor Feuilly?" Grantaire called. 

The man looked up from his conversation. "Grantaire, is it?" he said. "Good to see you still kicking."

"Likewise. So, I got Prouvaire’s outfit, but you have me stumped."

Feuilly looked down at himself. "I went low-effort," he said. "I’ve been saying it’s Zombie Joe Hill."

"I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as he could be," Combeferre sang softly to himself.

Feuilly looked at him more closely. "The man who never died," he agreed. "Don’t meet many people these days who know the old Labor songbook."

"I’ve brought you some fans," Grantaire told him. "This is Representative Enjolras (D. Mich.), and his campaign manager, Combeferre."

"It’s a pleasure," he said, and then grabbed the young man with the spikes by the beltloops of his BDU pants before he could escape out the door. "I needed those welfare numbers _tonight_ ," he growled.

Grantaire narrowed his eyes at the kid. He looked familiar, somehow. Take away the green hair and the safety pin through his nose, put him in a completely different context—

"I really admire your work for _Mother Jones_ ," Enjolras told Feuilly with painful sincerity, literal stars in his eyes.

"And _Postcapitalist Hermeneutics_ ," Combeferre added. "I think it’s one of the most important works on economics this century.

Feuilly let the kid go— the kid signed gustily and headed back toward a laptop-- and stared at Combeferre. "You read _Postcapitalist Hermeneutics_? I didn’t think _anybody_ read that. _I’ve_ barely read it."

"It’s a work of genius."

"You must be the one who wrote his position paper on social welfare reform," Feuilly replied, gesturing at Enjolras. Enjolras looked honored to be waved at. Grantaire felt slightly nauseous, although that might just be that he hadn't grabbed a drink before they came upstairs. "That’s an impressive plan. Might even work, numbers-wise, if you could get Washington to line up behind it."

"I— thanks. I was absolutely sure nobody had read _that_." Combeferre dropped into a chair across the table from him and Grantaire decided he’d just lost all chance of getting him back down to the main party any time that night. Enjolras was hardly better: he was staring at Feuilly like he was either tranfixed or transfigured. Grantaire reminded himself that this was why he'd wanted to bring them here.

"Oh, I read everything you had out when you asked me to endorse your team," Feuilly said. "I was curious. You’ve got some interesting ideas. Different from what anybody in a mainstream party has brought to the national table lately."

"If it’s not too awkward to ask," Enjolras said, "Why did you turn us down? I though it was on principle - you don’t work for politicians, you don’t want the distraction from your theory work - but, well, you’re here."

"Oh, well," Feuilly looked down at his screen. "Bahorel talked me into it."

"He’s just that convincing? If he’s magic, why doesn’t he ever actually _win_ anything?"

"Well, that’s how he talked me into it," Feuilly said. "He’s not trying to win, and I have no interest in being a kingmaker. We’ve had enough of privileged white men thinking they can tell everyone else what’s best. But he knows how to keep a public discourse going. Textbooks on economics as theology are fine as far as they go, but they’re never going to trick the public into thinking."

"I.. Sorry," Enjolras said, and sat down beside Combeferre. "It's not that I haven't given that dilemma a lot of thought - I have - but I'd hardly call you part of the privileged elite."

"You've heard the Official Story," Feuilly said, smiling wryly. "Unknown parentage, grew up in the system, earned my way into an exclusive prep school through hard work and talent. But I was a cute white baby with no stigmatized disabilities or inconvenient relatives; I wasn't exactly hurting for foster parents. And then I ended up in Scroll & Key with that one." He jammed a thumb in Grantaire's direction. "I may not compare to Mr. My-Mom-Ran-The-DNC over there on the scale of silver spoons, but here I am with a six-figure income and tenure, drinking chianti with Senators."

"I understand what you're saying," Enjolras said, leaning intensely over the table at him. "But aren't you coming perilously close to 'I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member'? Anyone who is within arm's reach of power is going to end up, well, here, sooner of later, no matter where they started."

"No, it's true," Feuilly answered, "And that's the paradox, isn't? So the answer I've found for myself is that I can't speak _for_ the disprivileged, but because of who I am, people listen to me, so I can speak _of_ them, and--"

Yeah, Grantaire wouldn't be getting Enjolras out of there for the rest of the night. He'd be lucky if Enjolras remembered he existed for the rest of the night, unless he wanted to get into a theoretical economics discussion with Feuilly, which was the precise opposite of the reason he came to these parties. But the aspersions Feuilly'd cast on his mom had suddenly made him remember where he'd seen the kid with the spikes before, and he caught him just as he had managed to quietly edge his way out into the corridor.

"Do your parents know where you are?" he growled at the boy's back.

He started and then turned to face Grantaire, hands out defensively, until he realized who it was and dropped them. "I don't know what you could possibly mean, Senator," he said. "I don't have parents, I was born fully formed from the streets of Washington."

Mr. Jondrette and his wife were the Bastard's dirty tricks specialists. They'd been part of his mother's circles since he was a kid, although in the part of the circle where you stayed at least ten feet away and washed your hands a lot afterward. He'd first met the kid at some event or another - one much more boring than this one - trying to sneak a glass of wine from the open bar.

He'd also been trying to sneak a drink - he'd been theoretically quitting at the time, leading up to his first House run; the kid must've still been in elementary school - and Grantaire hadn't been big on good decision-making at the time, but he was at least capable of making sure the kid got a ginger ale instead of a bottle of wine. Grantaire hadn't seen him around in what must have been years; he'd sort of assumed he'd escaped the political scene as soon as he could, like his sisters had. But Grantaire never forgot a face.

"Nice try," Grantaire said. "I've known you too long, young Mr. J-."

"It's Gavroche now," he cut Grantaire off. "Just Gavroche. And no, really, ask the Jondrettes if they have a son. They'll tell you they have no idea what you're talking about."

"You got yourself disowned?" Grantaire raised his eyebrows.

"Disowned is an awfully strong word," he said. "I feel like that would have required them to have acknowledged some association with me in the first place. But I did get told not to come home. Which hasn't really been relevant because I don't want to go back anyway." He had his arms crossed defensively, now. Grantaire knew the body language of someone who was trying to defend himself against ground-in misery.

"You're going to claim you're not working for them, huh? Not trying to sabotage Bahorel from inside? Get blackmail material for their files? These parties could be great places to get blackmail material. That's why Bahorel throws them, after all."

"Like they would have trusted me to do a job like that anyway," he said.

Grantaire had never gotten the impression that the Jondrettes ran their operation on _trust_ , but hell. It wasn't his job to keep Bahorel's campaign in order. And most of the things Grantaire could be blackmailed on were common knowledge on Capitol Hill already.

"Do they know who you are?" Grantaire asked, gesturing back toward the quiet room.

"Bahorel does," Gavroche said. "I told him when I interviewed for the internship. He said he didn't care, as long as I was willing to kick teeth and cause trouble and always punch up. The others don't. Don't tell them. Okay? I'm Gavroche, one name only. I don't want to be Jondrette Jr., I want to fix things."

"Fix things?"

"Fix the _world_ ," he said. "All the stupid broken crap that should work but doesn't."

"So you're turning on your parents, is that it? I'm surprised they let you leave."

"No!" he said, and sighed. "Look, they're total pieces of shit, but they're still my parents, I'm not going to, like, throw them to the wolves. Not that they ever let me see much of what they do anyway. And yeah, I made sure they knew that if they tried to pull that shit on _me_ I could drag them through the mud in the press until there was nothing left of them but a few strips of leather. So they're staying out my business if I stay out of theirs. But. Look," he said. "I just want to be a dumbass intern working on the world's least likely presidential campaign. That's all. And if people knew about them, they'd want me to be something else."

"Going to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps?" he asked.

"Fuck. You," Gavroche spat.

"Hey, not my business," Grantaire said. "Carry on."

"Do I pass inspection, then?" he said. "Jesus Christ, all I wanted was to grab another couple beers to get me through the welfare numbers and it's like dealing with somebody's protective ex-boyfriend."

"I like my friends," Grantaire said. "And I know what getting targeted by the Jondrettes is like. Sue me." He'd brought Enjolras and company here to give them a hand up, not throw them off the deep end.

"Whatever," Gavroche said. "You want a beer too?"

"Always." Might as well work on the open bar: at this point there wasn't anything else useful for him to do.


	6. you can take the functional out of the alcoholic but you can't take the alcoholic out of the function

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire needs to remember how to say no to this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \o/ I found the USB drive that had the next chapter and all my outlines on it! Have a chapter to celebrate.
> 
> ...also this was meant to be pretty g-rated but then Grantaire started making really bad choices even for him so the rating's going up. Vomit warning in this chapter.

There was a beautiful selection of beers, ranging from Pabst to high-end local microbrews, as usual for Bahorel's parties. As usual, Grantaire moved on from beers to more effective social lubricants pretty quickly. He caught a glimpse of Joly being tossed up above the general crush of the dancefloor once, followed quickly thereafter by the little speechwriter, so he figured they were doing fine without him. He really needed to be concentrating on networking, since he was here: they're reached the point of the campaign where fundraising would dry up really fast if the rats thought everyone else was fleeing, and he'd been running a bare-bones campaign from the start, but he still wanted to stay liquid.

Networking was what he was good at.

An hour's judicious conversation with the sort of people who came to these parties to feel dangerous but didn't actually want to _be_ dangerous got him commitments for enough campaign money to get him through the end of the year, and even better, three superdelegate endorsements. This was the part of the campaign when they were more valuable than gold: soon enough candidates would be dropping like flies as they convinced themselves they could never win.

Grantaire had never really thought he could win, so that put him at an advantage there. And he was picking up all the people who didn't like Valjean and had been holding out for someone better: there clearly wasn't going to be anyone better at this point, and he was the blandest of what was left. And, while nobody said it in so many words, they were all fairly sure he'd drop out by New Hampshire anyway, and they'd look decisive for now but still be free to go with the winner once it was too late to make a difference.

His kind of people.

It was the sort of work where having his campaign staff helping would be invaluable, but he didn't want to interrupt the dancing, and then he lost sight of them. Around midnight he picked up a Black Russian and went looking, and didn't find them until he got back around to the quiet room, and saw all three of them with Enjolras and Combeferre and Feuilly and what looked like all of Bahorel's staff, in a huddle around a laptop screen, and Bahorel himself sitting crosslegged on a table, his booming laugh cutting across the conversation and slow-match braided into his beard. You usually couldn't pry Bahorel out of the center of the action at one of these events; he thought it'd been odd that he hadn't seen him downstairs.

Gavroche looked up, saw him, and beckoned him in, but he shook his head and faded back out. Definitely not his party. Good for them that they'd all found each other, though.

He wound up in a lounge area downstairs, near one of the bars, when a man he eventually recognized as the Republican from the balloon dropped bonelessly next to him on the desperately-uncomfortable mauve couch.

"You're in love with him, aren't you," the Republican said out of nowhere, slurring a little. "I saw how you were looking at him in the gondola. How do you stand it?"

"Pardon?" Grantaire said. He wasn't precisely surprised to see the man here - Bahorel deliberately invited all sorts; he was of the opinion that the best way to build consensus was to build social ties, or something desperately idealistic like that, and he claimed he never minded hypocrites as long as they weren't lying to _themselves_. So as long as you were willing to be seen there, and could be trusted to behave yourself and keep it interesting, and were blackmailable enough to keep your mouth shut about the other guests, even people who publicly espoused positions that even Grantaire found abhorrent would sometimes turn up, if the person running the guest list decided to get creative, and Grantaire had a sickening suspicion that the person running the guest list for this party had been Prouvaire.

He'd kind of thought this Republican was too boring for Bahorel, though. Hidden depths.

"The blond kid," he said. "Enjolras. The one with the nice ass. You're in love with him."

Very shallow hidden depths, though.

"He does have a nice ass," Grantaire agreed. Technically he wasn't out to the general public, but this was one of Bahorel's parties, and Mr. "Are-you-a-Bible-reading-man" definitely wasn't out either. Not that he was surprised the man was gay: your chances were generally pretty good with the bible-thumping family-values types, and if he he'd earned an invite here he must already be pretty close to the mouth of the river denial. Very little chance that kind would out you in return, anyway; way too much risk on their part. "I can appreciate a nice ass," Grantaire added with studied nonchalance, and took a gulp of vodka. "You're a bit confused if you think that's the same as being in love. Who is it? An opponent?"

"I have this intern," he said, and sort of slumped over. "Also blond. Also nice ass. So _passionate_."

Grantaire shook his head. What was it about him that attracted these kinds of conversations? This is how he'd met Flora, even, being latched onto for a heart-to-heart about romantic tragedy. Was it just that he always safely drunker than they were? "If there's one thing I've learned in politics," he said, "It's that interns are never worth it. If you've gotta have an unattainable crush, make sure they're legitimately unattainable."

"Is that why you went for Enjolr-ass?"

"I don't know where you got the idea--"

"You brought him to the party as your date," the man pointed out. Somebody came around with a tray of wineglasses and he took one. "Subtle."

"You noticed, did you?" Grantaire muttered. "It was a trick." They'd come at the busiest part of the night, and it's not like there was a footman announcing all the arrivals. "Coincidence."

"Hah," he man said, and took a sip of his wine, then spat it out. "Faugh, that's foul."

"Saving the bad wine for when everybody's too drunk to notice." Grantaire said. "Not very Christian of him."

"You try it," he said, and waved the glass in Grantaire's general direction, falling over in the process until he was pretty much lying with his head in Grantaire's lap. But he managed not to spill the wine. Grantaire shrugged, finished the last few swallows of his vodka, and then took it.

It wasn't bad wine. It wasn't good, but it was tolerable. Of course, the vodka had basically dissolved his taste buds by that point, he probably wouldn't have noticed if it was poison. He drank the last of it and said as much, and then something occurred to him. "Wait. Was this you flirting with me?"

"Only if you wanted it to be." The man waved a vague hand. "But you clearly aren't getting anywhere with _your_ boy tonight, and I already knew I was out of luck."

"He's not _my boy_ ," Grantaire muttered. A teeny, tiny voice in the back of his mind was screeching, 'Say no to this!' but it was mostly drowned out by the alcohol. And anyway, if it happened at one of Bahorel's parties it didn't count. And the man wasn't half bad-looking. And it had been awhile: he'd been trying to be good during the actual campaign.

"The men's room?" he asked.

"It's traditional."

"Why not," Grantaire said.

Men's rooms at events like this tended more to the plush than the sordid, and Grantaire had done this in enough to judge, but there was still something special about going down on your knees in a stall with a toilet behind you and the noise of people socializing coming muffled through the wall. The man was gratifyingly responsive, even with a fist jammed in his mouth, and had a nice thick cock, and had managed not to say anything too horrifyingly Republican. He said the wrong name at the climactic moment, but that was only to be expected - he must have a great imagination if he could convince himself to replace Grantaire with a passionate blond intern.

At least it was good to know Grantaire still had skills that were valuable to _somebody_.

When he was finished the Republican offered to return the favor.

"You're uncommonly kind," Grantaire said, "But don't worry about it. I probably couldn't anyway - to much liquor and hard living."

"Oh, come on," he said. "It can't hurt to try."

The guy had clearly been looking forward to that part as least as much as the other. Poor man. Well, far be it from him to disappoint the wretch.

"I'm warning you, don't expect much," Grantaire said, as he got himself out. He leaned back against the stall partition and crossed his arms to get them out of the way as the man set to it with enthusiasm.

He wasn't bad. Not on Grantaire's level, but then who was, but he'd clearly had practice, and the natural talent that only comes to those who love what they do. But Grantaire wasn't getting there. He'd hardly expected he would. Too much drinking - tonight, and in general. He hadn't been feeling it much lately. He mostly felt drunk, and tired, and a little bit sick.

The man really was trying, though. Grantaire closed his eyes and did his best: thought about Flora's last good-bye after the divorce was final, thought about Joly and Bossuet cheerfully enfolding him, though about half-a-dozen other furtive encounters. None if it got him anywhere, any more than the man's enthusiastic tongue did. 

Well, if it worked for him, why not. He tried to imagine in was Enjolras on his knees there instead, thick curly blond hair, his passion for democracy turned into a passion for Grantaire's dick - but it didn't work. Enjolras would never be here, getting off on shame in a overdecorated bathroom. He just felt worse for trying; something was roiling in the pit of his stomach. And he didn't want Enjolras here anyway; Enjolras deserved -- two epiphanies hit him at once, like two bricks through the same window.

The first one, the shattering one, is, "Christ, I am in love with Enjolras."

The second one, the adding-insult-to-injury one that comes before either of them have time to react to what he's just blurted out, is, "I think I'm going to be sick."

He shoves the other guy off of him just in time to make it over the toilet, and then sags there, getting his breath back.

"Are you. Okay?" he asks Grantaire.

"I'm fine. Sorry. It wasn't you. Too much to drink. It's been awhile since I've thrown up before I passed out. Forgot what it feels like."

He feels strung-out and empty and he's not sure he could stand up properly if he had to.

"Do you need me to get someone? Call--"

"No!" Grantaire said. That was the last thing he needed. "I'm fine, but I think I'm going to call it a night. Go back to the party. Forget your troubles."

He gave Grantaire a dubious look but left, after a few seconds of straightening-up noises at the sink.

One he was alone, he went over and stared at himself in the mirror. Splashed water on his face. He still felt awful. "Grantaire," he told his reflection. "You are useless. No. You have _ambitions_ of someday achieving uselessness. He had to lean on the sink to stand up: he couldn't remember ever feeling quite this bad because of drinking. "Maybe I'm coming down with something," he said, and watched his reflection shake its head at him. It would be a nice excuse. "Yeah. Try that one on Joly. See if he buys it."

They'd all come together. He should let at least his people know that he was leaving before he called a cab. They were probably still all up in the quiet room: Joly and Bossuet knew how to have a good time, but they could also get incredibly excited about policy talk.

The stairs to the upper level seemed like an incomprehensible obstacle. He lurched his way up, and had to stop halfway because his legs muscles were trembling too much, and he couldn't catch he breath. He should have grabbed something to drink to steady himself, but he hadn't thought of it. For a moment, he thought his vision was going, or he was hallucinating again: all he could see was a grid of brightly-colored blobs. Then he realized he was leaning against a mural of Washington Crossing the Delaware that was made entirely out of kernels of corn, and dropped his head against the glass over it, because of course. Of course he was.

He dragged himself the rest of the way up and leaned more-or-less vertically in the doorway of the quiet room. He'd been right: they were all still huddled. The empty bottles had multiplied, and they'd taken over the table that had the dominoes game on it, but that was about the only change. He watched them for a moment, still feeling wiped out. He'd brought Enjolras here to, hey, have fun, make friends, relax a little; trust them to turn it into a high-level strategy session.

He was pondering ways to get their attention when Gavroche turned to grab another beer and caught his eye. "Jesus christ, Grantaire," he said. "You look like shit."

"Fuck you," Grantaire answered, trying for cheerful profanity and managing mostly pained. All of them were staring at him now. "Joly, Bossuet, I'm heading out, just wanted to let you know."

"You really don't look good," Joly told him, eyes narrowed. "Are you okay?"

Grantaire shrugged. "I overindulged. You know how it is."

Joly knew him well enough not to press.

Enjolras frowned. "Will you be okay to get back to the hotel?" He stood up and took a step forward, then paused with his hand on the back of Combeferre's chair. "Wow, it's 3 AM? I'll come with you."

Grantaire waved a hand in a fair approximation of nonchalance. "Stay here, you're clearly having fun."

He shook his head. "Actually, I think I've drunk too much, I've just noticed I'm not very steady on my feet," he said, with perfectly crisp Midwestern diction. "I should go and sleep it off."

Combeferre frowned at him and moved to get up himself, but Enjolras said, "You're fine, you're all more practiced drinkers than me, finish the outline and meet me back at the hotel."

They were all staying at a hotel over an hour away, in Iowa, for plausible deniability. It could have been the world's most awkward drive, but Enjolras must not have been kidding about being done for the night; less than fine minutes and he was curled up on his side of the car, fast asleep and drooling slightly on the window.

Grantaire was feeling somewhat better; possibly the two glasses of water Enjolras had insisted on fetching him while they were waiting for the car had helped, but the motion was making him vaguely nauseous and he barely even had the energy to obnoxiously insist on walking Enjolras to his hotel room when they arrived.

"You're my date, after all, it's only polite. Can't leave you to walk by yourself while intoxicated." he said. Enjolras was in fact a little wobbly on his feet, even after the drive. Grantaire was feeling physically better already, but also less drunk, which was unfortunate. "I didn't realize you even drank."

"I don't _not_ drink," Enjolras said. "I just don't enjoy it much. I get better highs from other things."

"From the liberty and justice running through your veins?" Grantiare asked sardonically, but Enjolras just nodded.

"You understand," he said, stumbling a little as the elevator let them out on his floor. "They kept handing me drinks, though, I didn't realize how many, I'm kind of embarrassed, after you went out of your way to help us, I'm not really putting my best foot forward, am I?" He looked up ruefully at Grantaire.

"Ah, well," Grantaire said, swiping his room key and opening his room door for him. "You just drank a little more than you realized. It happens to everyone. It could be worse," he added, as Enjolras stumbled in. "You think you did something embarrassing, I fucked a Republican. So, you know," Enjolras didn't seem to know what to say, so Grantaire just added, "Sleep tight," and shut the door.


End file.
